108,527 research outputs found
History and Philosophy of Science History
Science lies at the intersection of ideas and society, at the heart of the modern human experience. The study of past science should therefore be central to our humanistic attempt to know ourselves. Nevertheless, past science is not studied as an integral whole, but from two very different and divergent perspectives: the intellectual history of science, which focuses on the development of ideas and arguments, and the social history of science, which focuses on the development of science as a social undertaking within its broader contexts. There is almost universal agreement that this bifurcation of the field is lamentable, and nearly universal disagreement about where, exactly, the problem lies. In order to identify the difficulty, this paper examines the institutional histories and disciplinary philosophies that have constituted the study of past science. I argue that science history, eventually allied itself with either History or Philosophy in order to find institutional support, thereby suffering the artificial imposition of the disciplinary prejudices of its allied fields, which lead science historians to adopt either the intellectual or the social perspective. Science history must reconcile its distinctions on its own terms, as an integrated unity with its own disciplinary bounds, and apart from History and Philosophy. As a catalyst for rapprochement, the historical and philosophical examination also yields a mapping of the field of science history that can be used to locate the problematic divisions in present scholarship and to draw new disciplinary bounds
Defining determinism
The article puts forward a branching - style framework for the analysis of determinism and indeterminism of scientific theories, starting from the core idea that an indeterministic system is one whose present allows for more than one alternative possible future. We describe how a definition of determinism stated in terms of branching models supplements and improves current treatments of determinism of theories of physics. In these treatments, we identify three main approaches: one based on the study of (differential) equations, one based on mappings between temporal realizations, and one based on branching models. We first give an overview of these approaches and show that current orthodoxy advocates a combination of the mapping- and the equations - based approaches. After giving a detailed formal explication of a branching - based definition of determinism, we consider three concrete applications and end with a formal comparison of the branching- and the mapping-based approach. We conclude that the branching - based definition of determinism most usefully combines formal clarity, connection with an underlying philosophical notion of determinism, and relevance for the practical assessment of theories
Category theory and set theory as theories about complementary types of universals
Instead of the half-century old foundational feud between set theory and category theory, this paper argues that they are theories about two different complementary types of universals. The set-theoretic antinomies forced naïve set theory to be reformulated using some iterative notion of a set so that a set would always have higher type or rank than its members. Then the universal u_{F}={x|F(x)} for a property F() could never be self-predicative in the sense of u_{F}∈u_{F}. But the mathematical theory of categories, dating from the mid-twentieth century, includes a theory of always-self-predicative universals--which can be seen as forming the "other bookend" to the never-self-predicative universals of set theory. The self-predicative universals of category theory show that the problem in the antinomies was not self-predication per se, but negated self-predication. They also provide a model (in the Platonic Heaven of mathematics) for the self-predicative strand of Plato's Theory of Forms as well as for the idea of a "concrete universal" in Hegel and similar ideas of paradigmatic exemplars in ordinary thought
Commentary The Complexity of Intersectionality
Commentary to Leslie McCall's 2005 paper "The complexity of intersectionality", with a review of her main points and some critical remarks
Big Data Privacy Context: Literature Effects On Secure Informational Assets
This article's objective is the identification of research opportunities in
the current big data privacy domain, evaluating literature effects on secure
informational assets. Until now, no study has analyzed such relation. Its
results can foster science, technologies and businesses. To achieve these
objectives, a big data privacy Systematic Literature Review (SLR) is performed
on the main scientific peer reviewed journals in Scopus database. Bibliometrics
and text mining analysis complement the SLR. This study provides support to big
data privacy researchers on: most and least researched themes, research
novelty, most cited works and authors, themes evolution through time and many
others. In addition, TOPSIS and VIKOR ranks were developed to evaluate
literature effects versus informational assets indicators. Secure Internet
Servers (SIS) was chosen as decision criteria. Results show that big data
privacy literature is strongly focused on computational aspects. However,
individuals, societies, organizations and governments face a technological
change that has just started to be investigated, with growing concerns on law
and regulation aspects. TOPSIS and VIKOR Ranks differed in several positions
and the only consistent country between literature and SIS adoption is the
United States. Countries in the lowest ranking positions represent future
research opportunities.Comment: 21 pages, 9 figure
A Formal Model of Metaphor in Frame Semantics
A formal model of metaphor is introduced. It models metaphor, first, as an interaction of “frames” according to the frame semantics, and then, as a wave function in Hilbert space. The practical way for a probability distribution and a corresponding wave function to be assigned to a given
metaphor in a given language is considered. A series of formal definitions is deduced from this for: “representation”, “reality”, “language”, “ontology”, etc. All are based on Hilbert space. A few statements about a quantum computer are implied: The sodefined reality is inherent and internal to it. It can report a result only “metaphorically”. It will demolish transmitting the result “literally”, i.e. absolutely exactly. A new and different formal
definition of metaphor is introduced as a few entangled wave functions corresponding to different “signs” in different language formally defined as above. The change of frames as the change from the one to the other formal definition of metaphor is interpreted as a formal definition of thought. Four areas of cognition are unified as different but isomorphic interpretations of the mathematical model based on Hilbert space. These are: quantum mechanics, frame semantics, formal semantics by
means of quantum computer, and the theory of metaphor in
linguistics
A Sparsity-Aware Adaptive Algorithm for Distributed Learning
In this paper, a sparsity-aware adaptive algorithm for distributed learning
in diffusion networks is developed. The algorithm follows the set-theoretic
estimation rationale. At each time instance and at each node of the network, a
closed convex set, known as property set, is constructed based on the received
measurements; this defines the region in which the solution is searched for. In
this paper, the property sets take the form of hyperslabs. The goal is to find
a point that belongs to the intersection of these hyperslabs. To this end,
sparsity encouraging variable metric projections onto the hyperslabs have been
adopted. Moreover, sparsity is also imposed by employing variable metric
projections onto weighted balls. A combine adapt cooperation strategy
is adopted. Under some mild assumptions, the scheme enjoys monotonicity,
asymptotic optimality and strong convergence to a point that lies in the
consensus subspace. Finally, numerical examples verify the validity of the
proposed scheme, compared to other algorithms, which have been developed in the
context of sparse adaptive learning
- …